protons are a major component of cosmic rays, and there was likely a significant flux of cosmic
rays on the early Earth.” It is becoming more thought to have been that the building blocks of
life came from ice crystals in interstellar space, or from the same in meteorites and comets. Not
just the sugar of the DNA and RNA phosphate backbone, ribose, but the nucleobases as well,
where meteorites studied have been found to have three of the five adenine, guanine, and uracil
(2022). As well amino acids that are synthesized into proteins from DNA instructions.
Recently it has been discovered in the MICMOC experiment that started in 2003 at IAS that
through a non-directed method, as opposed to methods where results are achieved by synthesis
in the laboratory, which it must be to simulate something happening of its own accord in
conditions that were thought to exist when life got its start, they found the prebiotic formation of
ribose, where prebiotic means before life and leading up to it.
They have found from studying photochemistry and thermochemistry of laboratory ices
analogous to interstellar and cometary ices, prebiotic molecules, such as amino acids in the
organic residues from sublimation of the ices. Two very important residues were discovered,
glycolaldehyde of 2 carbon atoms and glyceraldehyde of 3 carbon atoms. The sugar ribose was
produced in a formose reaction that was natural and undirected, which was a first for ribose in
that the formose reaction, discovered by Aleksandr Butlerov, was not prebiotic but rather
directed in that it required a base catalyst, where with the comet ices they used the presence of
solvated electrons that are labile in the ice acted as a catalyst. It also produces much larger
quantities of ribose. The reaction is a polymerization of formaldehyde using glycolaldehyde and
glyceraldehyde.
Back to cosmic rays. DNA and RNA are twisted ladders, a spiral helix and this makes them
chiral, but they can rotate one way or the other, left or right, and life chose one giving it a
handedness. It has been suggested that because comic rays cause mutations and thus affect
evolution and since cosmic rays produce muons, which produce electrons and positrons, that
have their magnetic moments pointing in a direction opposite their velocity, making them
polarized and always with the same handedness, and since they can interact with biological
molecules, they can give the molecules over evolutionary time the choice of one handedness over
the other, through the weak interaction. Others argue the handedness comes from local
magnetic fields, or polarized light.
Still there are those who argue, like Trevors and Abel (2004) that
“Peer-reviewed life-origin literature presupposes that, given enough time, genetic instructions
arose via natural events. Thus far, no paper has provided a plausible mechanism for natural-
process algorithm-writing. Only 200 million years separated the of Earth’s bombardment from
the presumed first appearance of life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago.”
“The genetic operating system uses a bijective coding system whereby a certain triplet codon
represents a certain amino acid…How did inanimate nature write (1) the conceptual instructions
needed to organize metabolism (2) a language/operating system needed to symbolically
represent, record and replicate those instructions? (3) a bijective coding scheme (a one-to-one
correspondence of symbol meaning) with planned redundancy so as to reduce noise pollution
between triplet codon “block code” symbols (“bytes”) and amino acid symbols? (4) How did
inanimate nature design and engineer a cell (Turing machine?) capable of implementing those
coded instructions.”
In short, Trevors and Able are raising a point that many biologists are arguing, namely, not just
that DNA can evolve through mutations, but how did a mechanism get there that can evolve, a
complete language that can encode something as complex as life, be read, and copied to
reproduce.